How to Take Any Decent Product and Pitch It to a Target Audience Using a Review Formula That Tempts Consumers Into Buying!
My new site is located here: (link removed to prevent people from clicking on the AdSense ads) and the free AdSense theme template I got was from Dosh Dosh and man do I LOVE the step by step tutorial they give on how to use it. Great for we tech dummies.
A Step-By-Step Guide Void of Fluff That Helps You Get Started as an Online Marketer Using a Domain, Host, Shopping Cart and Blog and Making Money as an Affiliate or By Selling Your Own Info Products!
February 26th, 2010 | 
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Hi Tiff – The problem with Adsense lately is that everyone is jumping into the latest “Stuff Google” products and finding out how to get clicks for 2p a click or less. I don’t know if you’ve noticed your earnings plummet as a result or not?
Ads that were giving reasonable commissions are now virtually worthless to us website owners who host the ads. Let’s hope Google will sort out the problem FAST! Or everyone is going to jump ship, and advertisers will as well if their ads won’t show a return. It’s a viscious circle ’caused’ by the so-called Guru’s trying to help everyone, but in reality they’re destroying everything with their greed
Pete.
Hi Tiffany
This looks really interesting! I shall definitely be following along with this and building my own site.
You are such an inspiration!!
with all good wishes
Robert Mason
Hi Tiffany, do you know exactly Google means when they say you’re not allowed to make “made for adsense sites” in their adsense TOS? They give no explanation for the term at all (useless). I’m starting adsense myself and want to keep things very simple but I’m wondering if doing that will mean I’m making “made for adsense sites”. I don’t want to lose my adsense account. Thanks.
Hi, Tiff.
Thanks for the reviews you’re doing. Very helpful. I’ll be interested to see your final take on OWM.
Please keep up the good work.
Hi Tiff. Those values they tell you are the payments the adwords bidders pay for. They are not the amounts you actually earn per click. It’s hard to guess what percentage you will get, but it could be in the range of 30% or so. Time will tell when you see what you actually start earning per clicks
Tiffany, good on you for working on some Adsense sites. You can make a lot more money at it than most people realize if you choose good keywords and do the work.
But my main reason for posting is to caution you about revealing your sites. Not only because people will copy it, but because there are all kinds of people online who will clickbomb your site trying to get you thrown out of Adsense. It happens all the time, and Google is not very good at listening to your side of the story. I don’t even reveal my site to family, for fear they’ll click ads thinking they’re helping.
Well I didn’t have enough earnings TO plummet Pete LOL!
eew I sure don’t! I’ll look into that! Just looked into it…it seems those are MFAs (Made for AdSense) sites where they auto-scrape content from headlines and provide little to no content and ZERO unique content. A site that provides unique articles like I am won’t have a problem
Can you post the youtube link….my job blocks it so I can see the video from this page but i know a workaround if I have a link.
Thanks,
Desmond Owens
Right Clefty – I think I said “up to” but I may not have. It’s a # between like $3.00+ and the $40.+ or whatever.
eew Linda thanks for the warning. I won’t in future messages.
Wow! That’s a tough keyword to rank for. You are a brave woman. My adsense sites are way lower competition, and they still need quite a lot of backlinks.
Re Mark’s question on “made for adsense” – Google means thin sites that only have about 5-7 posts and have no other outgoing links or affiliate products. If you make your site substantial – 50-100 posts, which are useful and informative, link to useful other sites in the niche (or link to related articles in the mainstream press) and throw in a link to an Amazon Book for the niche as well, you should be ok.
Sure Desmond it’s here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmhEOrUUud4
Hi Tiffany,
I’m going to second Linda’s comment, and suggest that you remove the link to the site even from this post, just to be sure. I think it’s best to err on the side of caution. If anything, or if you want to show people what the site looks like, then put a screen shot or something like that of the site up and hide your domain. Thanks for doing this other case study!
Cheers,
Rafael
Tiff, ya gotta optimize the post pages! LOL.
The pages are showing “?p=5″!
Take care!
Chris
Hi Tiff,
Well as my kids would say “Now your speaking my krack-a-lackin language” LOL
I have been doing AdSense now for over 5 years. I made my first AdSense money in November 2004. It was $0.11
I am looking forward to fallowing this case study. I highly respect you as a marketer and writer. It will be interested to see how a seasoned IMer approaches AdSense as a complete newbie.
I would like to address Pete’s comment though about AdSense revenue dropping as I hear this all the time.
I disagree with his perspective. I have not seen a drop in my eCPM. I have looked at several websites where the owners have claimed their clicks have dropped in value. In most all of these cases the drop has been do to poor quality unfocused sites. AdSense has been using quality scores for AdSense publishers for about 2 years now. So if folks are not buying from the sites they are clicking through to from your AdSense then your share of the revenue is going to go down.
I am still testing AdSense only blogs so it will be most interesting to see Tiffany’s results here. I have many AdSense mini sites that still do well. But my best AdSense results over the past 2 years are from my Hub Pages.
Jeff C
good idea – done!
yep I will I just slapped them up late late late last night LOL
Hey Jeff – you say, “AdSense has been using quality scores for AdSense publishers for about 2 years now. So if folks are not buying from the sites they are clicking through to from your AdSense then your share of the revenue is going to go down.”
I’m confused. You mean if a visitor comes to my site let’s say for auto insurance quote…and they click on an AdSense ad to another site – if they don’t convert THERE then my earnings go down? Is that happening when the ad placement isn’t relevant enough or something?
Hi Tiffany,
I have a number of sites that fit what your doing. You mentioned not making a header which is correct as the idea behind these types of themes is to not be fancy but to get the viewers to click on the ads. Thus better not to use headers or to a degree images. Just plain Jane.
One point you seem to have missed or perhaps it’s coming up in a later video is keyword research.
While it’s all well and good that you have found something where advertisers are paying big bucks, what you haven’t looked at is what is the competition going to be for that keyword/keyword phrase.
If we Google Auto Insurance it returns 84.5 million results. Pretty stiff competition to get a high ranking. Even going for exact phrase it’s 16.7 million. Even Auto Insurance online is 49.4 million.
I would think that you’d want to dig down to see if there is some so called Low-hanging Fruits or “sub-niche” keywords.
A lot of folks that are achieving success with adwords are doing it by have a large volume of sites that might bring in $3-$5 average per site per day.
I’m very interested in seeing where this goes and what develops out of it.
“Is that happening when the ad placement isn’t relevant enough or something?”
Exactly!
It also happens when the content is to “thin”. What happened was Google started looking at AdSense publishers as affiliates and not so much just ad space. So they now want you to help pre-sell those clicking on ads.
The conversions don’t have to be huge. They are also (as far as I can tell) based on all click throughs and not on a per site bases. So if you have 100 CTs and non of them has resulted in a sale or action on the advertisers site then you are going to start seeing lower payouts across the board.
Google did this to clean up all the MFA sites and those sites designed to get the quick click out.
Jeff C.
I was just looking at your site, Tiff. I would strongly advice you to put up a privacy/TOC page ASAP! Even if it is just a pre-made one using a privacy plugin.
This is something that Google loves to suspend/ban AdSense accounts for not having.
Jeff C
Definitely agree. I’ll talk about this in my new video in a sec.
Right gotcha – my content’s going to be good. Well, relevant and beefed up enough – not scraped. 100% original.
Thanks Jeff will do!
Jeff show me an example of a toc – I put a privacy up.
Tiff I use a old plugin called Privacy Policy http://www.synclastic.com/plugins/privacy-policy/
It automatically builds AdSense friendly privacy policies like this one http://www.coffee-kettle.com/sitemap/privacy-policy/
They are very basic but for AdSense sites that get low to medium traffic they work and have the info that Google looks for.
For my high traffic sites I go the extra distance and use separate privacy and TOC pages customized just for those sites.
Jeff
Hey Tiff,
I believe Jeff was referring to “Smart Pricing”. I found 2 links that will shed more light on this subject; one from Google:
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/10/facts-about-smart-pricing.html
and another from Robin Good of Masternewmedia.org:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/online_marketing/AdSense-AdWords/Google-smart-pricing-what-it-is-and-how-affects-AdSense-earnings-20071204.htm
Ray
Hi Tiffany,
I am glad that you are doing your case study. What I am curious about is your domain name. I have always been told that to rank well leave out the dashes, and I am assuming that with the niche you chose being so competitive it will be even harder to rank for.
Now, here is another question that I am hoping someone could answer here. I know that adsense pays better on ads that convert to sales but how would Google know if the advertiser made a sale?
Judy: “I know that adsense pays better on ads that convert to sales but how would Google know if the advertiser made a sale?”
They’ve started insisting their big Adwords advertisers use Google Analytics. What happens is that if you are an Adwords Analytics advertiser, you get to track the whole thing from click to page through to shopping cart. So they know who has converted and who hasn’t.
That said, they know that conversion is down to the advertiser’s site rather than the referrer’s site (and they crack down on advertisers with poor landing sites) – so if you get low values per click it’s either down to the click coming from a country where there isn’t much adsense advertising (eg most of the developing world) or if the advertisers have held back and ensured that CPC falls (due to such things as advertisers budgets being pruned after Christmas). Finally note that even if Google gets £49.99 from the advertiser, the Adsense publisher will only get about 25% of this…
Google has been sending out a lot of £75 free Adwords vouchers lately to tempt people to try out Adwords. I urge people to give it a try, simply so you get to undertand things from the other side (you get to set a limit on the advertising and I set mine to well within the voucher value). Plus look at videos put out by Dan Thies and Ed Dale on Adwords campaigns (just Google to find them). It’s an eye-opener as to how the advertisers think.
Tiffany:
I am very anxious to see how this Adsense site works out for you. I have been very interested in adsense for a while, but have not really done anything with it. I will watch very closely. Take Care,Sam
Tiff:
Thanks for doing this case study. I have never really focused on Adsense on any of my sites. I typically go for affiliate advertising. But I do understand that people make a lot of money from Adsense, so I am looking foward to the results of you case study.
I do not want to take the time to try and see if I can make money with an Adsense site so I really to appreciate what you are doing for us.
- Rick
HI, Tiffany! How are things going? Your blog is very interesting! Are you still using SpyFu? You know, there’s a newer tool – Keyword Competitor, connect me and I’ll tell you more about that
-Alexandra
Hey Alexandra! I canceled SpyFu so I could try SENuke – I like to play around. After I finish my SENuke case study, I’ll be happy to try KC
Hey Tiffany, I’ve been reading some of your newer blog posts, and really enjoyed the Cheap Campaign series in particular.
I’ve got a ton of Adsense sites, but I’ve been converting some over to a new affiliate system I’ve been trying out. If your Adsense sites are talking about topics that have related physical products, you might end up making a little more with Prosperent. I linked to the Squidoo lens I made about it, if you want some more info.
thanks Rennick I will check it out